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Obamacare Billionaire: What One Entrepreneur's Rise Says About The Future Of Medicine

North Kansas City is an unlikely place to launch a revolution in American health care. Yet here, amid the dilapidated grain elevators, fast food joints and vast green plains, the dream of using computers to keep you alive at a reasonable cost is battling onward. In a bunkerlike building built to withstand a direct hit by a category five tornado, 22,000 servers handle 150 million health care transactions a day, roughly one-third of the patient data for the entire U.S. Records of your blood pressure, cholesterol, lab test results, that gallbladder surgery last year—and how much you paid for it—may sit there right now. Armed guards stand watch.

This is a data center at the headquarters of Cerner, the world’s largest stand-alone maker of health IT systems—and company number 1,621 on FORBES’ Global 2000 list—where the blood-and-guts realities of medicine meet the ­sterile speed and exactitude of the computer revolution. For 33 years founder and Chief Executive Neal Patterson has preached better health through information, a world in which powerful digital machines right out of Star Trek link hospital bedsides with real-time data on what ails the entire nation, finding patterns, suggesting treatments—and tracking costs. Patterson, 62, has likened the journey to pushing a “500-pound marshmallow up a hill” but now insists that health care’s moment of digital transformation has arrived. “It is finally happening,” he says. “Without a doubt in my mind, it is happening this decade.”

It would certainly seem so from Cerner’s financials. Over the past five years sales have grown an annualized 9% and earnings 22%. Last year the company booked $307 million in profits on sales of $2.2 billion. Since Patterson started Cerner in 1979 it has been consistently profitable, and shares have increased at an annualized 22% since a 1986 IPO. That’s 11% better than the S&P 500 over that 26-year span. The appreciation of Cerner’s shares has made the frugal Patterson a very rich man. His Cerner stake is worth $1 billion.

Patterson’s innovations in computing and data storage certainly helped fatten that number. But Washington, especially President Barack Obama, has given him a healthy boost. As the rest of the economy floundered, Cerner boomed, thanks to a 2009 law that was Obama’s first foray into health care. The Health Information Technology for Economic & Clinical Health (HI TECH) was a $19 billion part of the 2009 stimulus bill designed to create new jobs. This bipartisan effort—even stimulus basher Newt Gingrich lobbied for it—aims to entice and then punish hospitals into finally going digital. Those that meet certain milestones, such as using computer systems to order medicines, detect deadly errors and keep patient records, get payments. Any hospital that doesn’t have “meaningful use” of IT by 2015 will face a cut in reimbursements. It’s a market-based system, because it allows hospitals to choose among rivals such as Cerner, Allscripts and General Electric, but it practically forces everyone to buy something, at a cost of up to $30 million per hospital—and that’s without the extra IT staff they need to hire. This made health IT one of the hottest hiring sectors of the whole economy. Cerner’s workforce grew 20% to 10,500 employees in the past year, and the company is opening a new 660,000-square-foot office complex in Kansas City to hold 4,000 more employees.

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This article is a lie. The H.I.M. system(health integrated management) was proposed and made law before Obama began his presidential run. Many of the old country doctors closed prior to the 2012 mandatory institution of HIM system. Our medical community, for better or worse has become more of a data entry job than medical provider.

There is much more information out there about CERNER. I use Cerner’s systems. They are impediments to satisfactory nursing care and medical care in general. When considering the inferior and insufficent quality of its systems, I wonder how it has not been investigated. When reading the following, I wonder if there is additional flows of money to the decision makers:

QUEENSLAND Health is again facing accusations it favoured an IT supplier that became the frontrunner for a multimillion-dollar government contract.

Confidential papers show a Health boss already was in talks with software company Cerner Corporation at least a year before consultants were hired to conduct an external investigation into potential suppliers.

The electronic medical records project was even given the codename “Project Mango” to avoid constantly naming Cerner in official correspondence, the papers said.

Thank you for a revealing, but one sided article. But, I like the comments even better.

This is a great article that says what many are wondering, “Will healthcare IT finally take hold and drive down cost while increasing the quality of care?” The answer is, “Absolutely.” I wrote about this a few weeks back:

People are distracted by the political arguments but mostly unaware of the 2009 Stimulus Bill that funded the move to electronic medical records and Meaningful Use. It changed everything by funding just enough move to digitization to create critical mass for change.

The burning question for Epic, Cerner and others is how that data will be used. Will it be locked in their application or will it be made available to continuously improve and lean healthcare organizations?

The benefits of the devices covered in the report are scant. The programme has been a horlicks. The financial benefits have accrued to the CEOs of the vendors and their entourage in the corner suites, including Patterson and Faulkner.

There have not been any benefits for patients, the doctors, the nurses, and others on the health care team. They are the guinea pigs for the vendors.

Meaningful use of meaningfully dangerous devices makes no sense. The cart is before the horse.

First, the devices must be assessed and approved for safety, efficacy, and usability. Anything short of that puts the patients at risk for unexpected and eggregious death and injury.

Next time you see your physician for a problem, see if he is staring at a computer screen furiously entering data during the time of your consultation. Did he or she look you in the eye? The physician/patient connection is what consultation is all about, and it is under assault on many fronts. I’ve yet to see a medical information system that is user friendly. Most get in the way.

That is exactly what I am seeing. Nurse Bunny turned her tail to me while computing and said “why are you here today?” All the medical providers primary and specialist are carrying stethoscopes as a fashion statement because all they do is enter data.

As a member of one of the largest HMOs already equipped with extensive electronic record keeping, I believe the future of medicine under Obamacare will create greater opportunities for middlemen entrepreneurs, from data miners to offshore labs. Care may become more profitable, which will cause the insurance companies and hmos to order more tests, and use the electronic data to justify increasingly absurd rate increases. It may be better documentation, but it is not better care.

Since data terminals were installed at my HMO, my doctor now spends 90% of a visit typing into a terminal and 10% of, at most, a 15-20 minute visit interacting with me.

We’ve seen this data candy store before. It’s only a matter of time before the healthcare derivatives market skyrockets.